New in Rise 360: More Course Customization with Themes

Jul 19, 2022

I’m so excited to share our latest release with you. Today, we shipped a huge update to Rise 360 that gives you more creative ways to customize the look and feel of your projects. Rise 360 now includes a variety of scroll-stopping themes—all created by award-winning designers—with more themes coming soon. Apply themes in just a few clicks, or, for that extra-personalized touch, we’ve added the option to customize many theme elements. 

The possibilities are endless, so let’s take a closer look at all the latest Rise 360 goodness.

New Themes

Rise 360 has always been a great option for quickly creating beautiful, responsive courses. And with the addition of Rise 360 themes, you’ve got brand-new ways to add your own unique spin to projects. 

Here’s a quick rundown of each theme:

  • Rise—our original theme—is modern and clean-lined. It’s a tried-and-true design choice that never goes out of style.
  • Apex makes a bold, contemporary statement with striking, angular flourishes.
  • Horizon is a great choice when your project needs a design that’s elegant, sharp, and stylish.

You can see all three styles in the image below.

And these stunning new themes are just the beginning. We’ve got even more theme designs in development.

New Theme Customization

Before, Rise 360 theme customization options were found under the Settings menu. Now, we’ve pulled theme settings into a new Theme menu, as you can see below.

BEFORE

Before

AFTER

After

This change streamlines course creation by nesting all of the theme customization options in one spot. Under the new Theme menu, you’ll click to choose your desired theme and then click Save to apply it to your project. It’s as easy as that.

These striking themes were designed to be used as is to simplify and speed the course creation process. But for that extra-personalized look and feel, we’ve added more options to customize elements like cover page layout, navigation type, lesson headers, accent colors, font pairings, button styles, and more. With so many flexible options, you can style your theme to better meet your learners’ needs and easily create more cohesive, branded learning experiences.

To give you an idea of how these new themes can be customized, explore the following examples. We applied each theme to the same course content—and we customized each version with unique colors, navigation, and lesson header styles.

Explore Horizon

Horizon

Explore Apex

Apex

Explore Rise

Rise

What’s your favorite combination? Leave me a comment below.

Summing It Up

The new Rise 360 themes feature opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And we’re just getting started. There are more stylish theme designs in the works and we’re making progress on giving you the ability to create your own custom themes as well. We’re excited to continue delivering features that empower you to create eye-catching, unique learning experiences in record time. 

Want to try out Rise 360 themes for yourself? Head over to your Rise 360 dashboard and start with a new course, a course template, or any existing Rise 360 project. Don’t have Rise 360? Start your free 30-day trial of Articulate 360 now. 

Be sure to keep an eye on our Articulate 360 feature road map and the What’s New page to stay up-to-date on what we’re working on.

133 Replies
Holy Pope

I have a problem with the cover image not displaying when you are in a lesson. It should display behind the lesson title in the top left of the screen above the menu. All the courses we built before the themes update still have their images. Anything build after that time do not. Please could you fix this issue asap.

Darren McNeill

I have just been asked to review a course created 6 months ago and to make a few minor edits but now the Video player etc is different to the original and so has shifted the videos on the different slide. I put an invisible rectangle over the player to stop users from scrubbing (something is still missing from Storyline 360 but is in Rise) but these have now been shifted. I have to go through each slide with videos to adjust them again. Now that the video player is different I have to redo 20 modules in a set to keep them with the same look and feel.

Karl Muller

Hi,

Whether or the small image appears in the top  left corner, depends on the theme and options you selected.

Here is one way to get it back using the Rise theme:

Select THEME.

Select Rise.

Select Save and Confirm. 

Select Cover Page.

Choose Left Overlay and Save.

Choose Sidebar.

Choose Light with image and Save.

Choose Back.

Note that you need to reselect your course Accent Color and Fonts.

Kevin Perry

We used to be able to control the behavior of the navigation menu on the left of the screen - either disabled completely, default closed, or default open. Since the Themes update, we only have the option of disabled, or default open. 

It would be great to have the "default closed" option back, thanks very much!

Jay Russo

@Crystal, this results in being forced to change the appearance and functionality of Rise projects. Upon publish, the project no longer looks like its original self, or (in my team's case, many hundreds of) other Rise projects in our library of customer-facing content. In my opinion, the new themes features should NOT have been released without the custom themes settings. Is there a way to roll back the clock on the themes update until full custom theme functionality is available?

Julie Stelter

I'm using the standard RISE theme. But the cover image has a "blueberry" background. It should be white. If I change the accent color to white, that changes the image, but then I have white accents elsewhere which are not visible. How can I remove this color but keep the RISE theme?

Thank you!

Julie

Bruce Austin

Not sure if this has been discussed or not but I have created templates for my team with an image in the Lesson Headers. Problem is that every time I copy a course, the image disappears and is replaced with a default blank tif. Please fix this so that my image sticks and is repeatable across courses. 

Nigel Kirkby

Hi, I'm having an issue where, if a course used two custom fonts, then we created a new pair of custom fonts (with different names) and used theme\fonts to use those new fonts, both the old and new custom font WOFF files are being added to the exported SCORM1.2 file, even though the old custom fonts are not being referenced anymore (in fact it doesn't show up at all under 'manage fonts'. Can someone look into this please, as the whole point of our exercise was to reduce the size of our exported SCORMs (as our original font WOFF file was over 10MB!)? Thanks.

Nigel Kirkby

Hi, I've looked at the exported file again and it also includes the WOFFs for every single custom font that has ever existed for this course. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue, but where we have inadvertantly created a 12MB whopper, we really need a way to purge this from all of our courses!